Have you ever experienced this? You read a restaurant menu and find something like “Discs of cacahuazintle corn, filled with golden pork crust, bits of crushed chiles and bean powder,” and when the dish arrives at your table, you realize it’s a pork crackling taco with beans and spicy salsa.
Behind this phenomenon of naming culinary creations lies an entire field of study that reveals many aspects of contemporary gastronomy. The first, and most evident, is that it represents a snobbification of cuisine, or in other words, an aspirational charge that seeks to elevate a dish, solely through its name, to something unique and sophisticated. Memes have even emerged on social networks around this phenomenon, where typical Mexican snacks are renamed with these sometimes pretentious and occasionally baroque denominations.
Other interpretations of the phenomenon offer explanations that allow us to delve deeper into its causes and understand how we relate to food. A Stanford University study evaluated the impact of names on consumption preferences. Over 46 days, they observed university students in the school cafeteria. On some days, vegetable dishes were simply named “carrots,” “zucchini.” They discovered that when the dish’s name included a description of the dressing or cooking method, such as “glazed carrots with calorie-free sugar” or “zucchini with citrus infusion,” consumption of these dishes increased by 25%, even though it was the same dish. The researchers argue that the most effective strategy to increase consumption of certain foods is not to provide an endless list of health benefits, but to appeal to names and preparation methods, since the vegetables were not presented simply boiled, but with dressings and complements that made them more palatable.
On many other occasions, dish descriptions appeal to nouns that studies have linked to synonyms of quality in the consumer’s mind. For example, “from the garden” is immediately valued as something “more natural” or “healthier” simply by being included in the dish’s name. “Controlled designation of origin” for many diners represents quality control of the food or, at the very least, gives them certainty about its origin, which nowadays is a value in food characterized by complex networks and links within the producer–final consumer chain.
Faced with these trends, we find that some of the world’s most renowned chefs are beginning to advocate for simplicity in naming dishes, to prioritize quality in the origin of ingredients. Auguste Escoffier, one of the most famous chefs in history, said, Faites simple (Make it simple). In the logic of less is more, when a dish is simple but made with carefully selected ingredients, the quality of the flavors is enhanced. When a dish is more complex, the combination of ingredients can mask certain lower qualities of some components. Undoubtedly, this is a topic for discussion, since there are culinary preparations, such as mole, where one cannot do without a variety of ingredients. In this case, it would be necessary to define what simplicity means in culinary terms, and even more so, what implications this return to simple (but substantive) descriptions would have in the consumer’s mind.
Originally published in El Economista
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.